Here’s my Mark E Smith story. It’s a long story but really good. Back in the 2004 myself and Chris from Rubulad used to have a party called “Aerosol Burns” at the bar Boogaloo in Williamsburg. The place held about 50 people. The way it worked was, we would have bands play and me and Chris would dj after, usually until 7am. We would charge admission for the bands , and then we would charge admission AGAIN at 4am for the after hours segment of the evening. It was pretty lawless in there. The mixture of coked up Williamsburg hipsters and wasted local Puerto Ricans from the neighborhood made for an “interesting tapestry” to say the least. Never have I seen drugs used so casually, crack smoked so openly. (Hi mom!)

Anyway, the party was very popular for a while , and we had some really popular bands play. One day we got an email from someone at Tiger Style I think ? I can’t remember exactly- but it was a friend of mine ... They were looking after The Fall and they said they had a day off and thought it would be cool to do a show with us. It was a perfect fit- the vibe, the drugs, the crowd... We announce the show and people show up early for tickets. There are die hard fans of this band out there... And a lot of them are pretty square and annoying (shocking) ... They did not quite know what they were getting themselves into that night. Anyway, I get there for sound check and Mark E Smith was great. Super sweet and happy and very excited to play this little room.

So after they play, Mark E hung out all night like a boss. He went into the bathrooms with the hipsters (probably to talk about music)... He was all-in. The next day I get a call from my friend at Tiger Style- Mark E is missing. He never left the club last night. So, I call the owner and he doesn’t answer. A few hours later he calls me back. Turns out he, Mark E, and a few locals went to the roof to “talk about music” and got locked up there. They never slept and just “talked about music” all night. He had a great time.

i've loved the fall for decades but also always nagged about mark's behavior: charged with assaulting his bandmate girlfriend, leaving people stranded in the middle of overseas tours by telling them they were fired, etc. the typical dilemma of separating out the art from artist.

on the other hand, you have to give it to a guy who said:

"We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible. I said, 'Shut them cunts up,' and they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The band said, 'That's the Sons of Mumford' or something, 'They're number five in the charts!' I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers."

yeh it is and it defineitly is by way of mcluhan, exactly the sort of writer smith would gobble up. he talks a lot about how differnt media alter the sense ratio.

The song is lampooning music criticism and even takes quotes from actual reviews of the fall ("The singer is a neurotic drinker/The band little more than a big crashing beat/Instruments collide and we all get drunk"), but then that last line really takes it to the next level. Best response to a bad review ever.

Must confess I didn´t know anything about mcluhan but skimmed through his wikipedia page and it sounds very likely you´re right. Sounds fascinating, will have to check him out.

I guess Philip K Dick, Lovecraft, Anthony Burgess are the most obvious literary influences on MES´s lyrics, but really there's no one quite like him is there?